You Noticed
by maddening
Summary: Shepherd never talked about herself. But Thane didn't need her to say something out loud for him to notice. A drabble with possible future non-connected drabbles to follow.


Everything belongs to BioWare.

I have a behemoth Dragon Age AU-ish story I've been working on for months that I've stalled out on. And this is something that popped into my head so I scribbled it down. First posting, first fic that anyone outside of my husband has read.

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Commander Shepherd had the worst maintained hands he'd ever seen on a human woman. Beyond the tiny stubs of nails, the rough callouses, and frequent splints, grafts, and scars that came from a fighting style that favored heavy use of hand to hand tactics, there was often some sort of residue clinging to her fingers. Occasionally there were also bits of what looked like markers or paint splattered on her hands or poorly scrubbed away from around her nails and soaked into the cuticle. They were in hues of metallic silver or blacks most often, but occasionally a little fleck of red or gold.

At first, he thought perhaps it was something rubbing off from the inside of her armor but it was never in exactly the same place, the same pattern, and wouldn't she get something like that fixed? When they'd talk, he would often train his eyes on the tabletop, looking thoughtful, looking as if he were sorting through memories or choosing his words carefully. But really, he was studying her hands. Whatever it was, it seemed tacky, sticky, and she sometimes pressed her fingertips to each other and then pulled them back apart, watching the skin pull and stretch for a moment before the .. glue? polymer? … gave way. He was sure she didn't even realize she did it. It happened in those moments when a comfortable silence grew between them, each lost in private thoughts. It was the only such tick or habit he'd seen her exhibit. She didn't even pace, tap her leg, chew on her lip, or any of the other all too common idiosyncrasies he was accustomed to humans giving in to when they were thinking or uneasy, or simply didn't realize they were being watched.

He had never asked her what the reason was. When he was alone, he'd often recount their conversations and at some point realized that he… never asked her anything. Occasionally he'd pose something hypothetical to make a point or explain a philosophical stance. But he never actually asked her about herself, her own thoughts or feelings, her past. Perhaps he had been waiting for her to offer them, as he'd found himself offering things about himself. And the things he found himself telling her were things he never would have imagined himself sharing but that, once the topic was broached, he found enormous relief in talking about. And yet – despite promising himself that he would return the favor the next time she visited him, the next time she stared out at the drive core and sated her curiosity about whatever it was that day that she had come to discuss with him, he never did. Why that was, he could not say.

Something about the way she looked when she thought no one was watching, perhaps; Those slips in her cool veneer of control when the subtlest change to the quality of her blank expression would creep in. In those moments she looked haunted. He was cursed with a perfect memory – but in looking at her sometimes he wondered if it wasn't so much worse to have a fragmentary one. One that colored reality, changed perceptions, left out key pieces of information and could twist the simple facts of occurrences, conversations, and events into half formed and misunderstood landscapes. Wouldn't it be better to know exactly what your colony looked and sounded like as it was bombarded by slavers than to find yourself wondering about what tone your last words with your parents were really like? Or worse, convincing yourself through faulty memories that you could have, should have, done more. Wouldn't it be better to know beyond a doubt exactly how long it took for your squad to be wiped out instead of fooling yourself into believing that you had more time to help, that you simply hadn't been good enough?

No, Shepard was caught in the prison of her own past far more than anyone ever deserved to be, while also having the misfortune of being the last person in the galaxy with the opportunity for reflection.

So he simply waited between missions for her to arrive, sometimes very late at night, often as her last check in before she retired to her cabin. He'd begun to wonder if she didn't save her conversations with him for last or if that was his own skewed perspective.

"Thane, do you have a moment?"

"Of course, what would you like to discuss?"

When Shepherd chose to speak with him, she was expressive – even more so than most humans – and simply watching her face as she spoke was somewhat… fascinating. Every muscle that lay between her skin and her skull seemed to play some part in the expression of even the most mundane things. She had a multitude of facial quirks that conveyed amusement, but each of them slightly different, meaning slightly different things, the same for annoyance, for sadness, even for happiness, though he saw few of those. Her hands moved in gestures that could have been a conversation all on their own. He'd rarely met a person as quietly animated, as adept at gracefully conveying thoughts and desires large and small. It was why her crew worked. It was why she'd gained so many allies, talked down so many enemies. It all seemed so effortless.

Sometimes she would launch in immediately with a ready set of questions for him, something she'd already thought about, but often times she'd just float in like a ghost until she was sitting across from him, patiently waiting for him to begin. That had happened more and more lately as they got closer to their eventual goals. She took this time there with him to be alone, to think. He'd tried to encourage her to meditate but she swore to him she didn't have the temperament for it and dismissed it with a smirk and a rueful shake of her head, as if she'd heard nothing that silly in quite a long time. Despite that fact, he was sure that these visits, these stretches of silence, were her way of trying.

When she came to him without talking, when she sat there and pressed her sticky fingers together and pulled them apart over and over again, it was as if her burdens were a void in the very center of her, pulling her in, diminishing her like a minute singularity swirling in her chest. He had no way to help her, no strategy for this and no instinct for friendship. He did not know how to return the kindness she'd showed him or how to dig and when to give way. So he waited and he watched and he studied her hands and tried to decide what it was that was sticking her fingers together. Something in the hangar bay? Something that needed fixing somewhere in engineering? Maybe some sort of bore cleaner he was unfamiliar with.

The chair scraping back across the floor suddenly drew him out of his thoughts, eyes shooting to Shepherd who stood, looking down at him with an odd expression on her face.

"Is something the matter?"

She shook her head "no" just slightly but continued to stare at him. He had no idea what he'd done, but after a long moment of standoff, Shepherd reached down for his hand and pulled, indicating that he should get up, which he did. He was utterly confused, but he trusted her, so he followed when she continued out of Life Support and into the elevator, not dropping his hand, and not explaining herself any further. While the elevator ascended to her quarters on the top level of the ship, he watched her face and concentrated on the sensation of her hand gently gripping his. Her hands were calloused across the palms where they met his, but where his fingertips wrapped around the back of her hand, he could feel that the skin was soft and very smooth, a direct counterpoint to the small scales that adorned even his palms. Her expression was somewhat impassive, but she had a determined edge to her, chin jutted out just slightly, as if she were soldiering through some decision that had been made.

When the elevator opened, she walked through the door and into her quarters without hesitation, still holding his hand. Once the doors shut behind them automatically she dropped her grip on him and took a few steps back, arms crossed as she leaned against the wall and watched him. He wasn't sure what he was meant to do, so he simply stood there, arms clasped behind his back, looking at her.

Eventually she sighed "I guess sometimes when you relive memories aloud you don't actually realize you're doing it, am I right?"

His felt his brow ridge twitch at that "I… yes, sometimes. Did I say something that upset you?"

Shepherd let out a breath and took a step closer to him, dropping her arms from their defensive posture. "Not … exactly. It just never occurred to me that you were… creating memories of me. I mean… it sounds ridiculous when I say it that way – you remember everything – so why not the conversations we have as well? I just…" She looked down at her hands and stuck her fingers together, the tacky substance creating a bond for a moment before she pulled them apart. When she looked up, she was smiling, a truly happy expression on her face, though somewhat amused as well – Thane was sure it was his favorite expression of hers. "Of all the things for you to obsessively think about – it was airplane glue."

"Airplane glue?" He was sure there was something lost in the translation, perhaps it was an idiom he'd never heard before.

"Cyanoacrylate glue. It's an adhesive that sticks just about any material to just about anything else and has little to no cure time to set. And, well, it's really difficult to scrub off with normal soap." Shepherd stepped past him and toward her desk and he realized then that what she'd been waiting for him to do when first depositing him here in her room was to look around. Truthfully it's what he normally would have done had he not been so confused.

There over the desk was an array of model versions of a wide variety of ships. A Turian cruiser, the Citadel, The Destiny Ascension, a Flotilla colony ship, and several others he didn't immediately recognize. Spread out along the desk itself were a multitude of tiny plastic pieces, arranged in an almost exploded diagram of another ship, the box the model came in was propped up, as if she'd been using it as a reference. Tiny glass bottles of paint and miniscule paint brushes were arranged along the back of the desk in order of hue, most of them in shades of metallic silver and gray.

"When I can't sleep – which is most of the time – I do this."

"I had no idea you had a hobby, Shepherd." Thane smiled slightly at her and was glad to see her laugh in response.

"It's a pretty ridiculous hobby, truth be told. I can't even use the excuse of it being a holdover from childhood. I was far more likely to be climbing trees and swimming than to be holed up somewhere doing something like this when I was a kid. But now I've got all this… space." She frowned at the room in general, as if having more than just a bunk was unpleasant. "So… there you go. Secret's out. But uhm… don't tell anyone else, okay?"

"Are you ashamed of building model ships?"

Despite the slight blush on her cheeks, Shepherd shook her head "No, not ashamed. I just… no one else knows. Because no one has ever asked. And while I know technically you didn't either – you still noticed and wondered."

Thane wasn't sure what to say to that. It seemed strange to him that someone with so many friends was as keenly private as she surely was. It wasn't that she had never opened up to him – she simply never opened up. From the look on her face now he could tell she was beginning to panic, to wonder if it had been a mistake to bring him up here, even for something so frivolous. He would never make her regret it. He swore it to himself before he swore it to her out loud.

"Your secret is safe with me, Shepherd."


End file.
